Thursday, May 20, 2010

Why is the Obama administration going along with the information blackout?

Now let us get to part 2: why is Team Obama enabling this nonsense? I come up with two possibilities:

1. Team Obama believes the BP BS

2. Obama does not want to look impotent. Revealing that the leak is really bad and not having a quick solution is an Obama PR disaster. Obama has to work through BP unless he can implement an action plan using only government resources or by working with another oil company with deep ocean expertise. Given the lead times for government contracting, this would take quite a while.

If the leak is as serious as I fear, this is environmental equivalent of the Iran hostage crisis. Team Obama recognizes this, and therefore wants to create the impression as long as possible that everything that could possibly be done is being done. Note that the Administration is behaving with BP exactly as it did vis as vis the banksters in early 2009: believing that the problem is too complex and scary for them to assert control, casting its lot in with the people who caused the problem in the first place (while calling them bad names often enough to create plausible deniability). And enabling BP’s coverup of how bad the leak means, as Obama did with the financial services industry, of having to support, or at least not undermine too much, its PR efforts.

I'll try to exlain why I haven't been blogging about the disaster tonight,not that Iexpect anyone to care much.

For a few reasons, my politics have moved further to the left over the last several months and I've have started several posts that would be considered either populist or heretical. Not that I'd object to either label, but I wouldn't want to use a disaster to jump on an anti-capitalist soapbox, esp. since I would have jumped on it much earlier if I had had the time. Of course, the disaster hasn't knocked fundies off their soapbox (and why the hell didn't Rachel Maddow ask little Paul about pollution and libertarianism?).

Also, I was hoping some of these guys would turn out to be right and we'd have a pointless and predictable discussion about what a near disaster says about the need for better regulation. I would say, "funny what an ideological litmus test this has turned out to be," but there's nothing funny about utterly predictable "market good/government regulation bad" robotic responses.